After a year of uncertainty surrounding National Institutes of Health funding for research institutions across the state and country, UMass Chan Medical School in Worcester saw the largest drop in NIH funding between fiscal years 2024 and 2025 in Central Massachusetts. UMass Chan, the region’s largest recipient of NIH funding when ranked by number of […]
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After a year of uncertainty surrounding National Institutes of Health funding for research institutions across the state and country, UMass Chan Medical School in Worcester saw the largest drop in NIH funding between fiscal years 2024 and 2025 in Central Massachusetts.
UMass Chan, the region’s largest recipient of NIH funding when ranked by number of awards, experienced an approximately $3-million decline in this past year. The university received $193.3 million for 372 awards in 2024 and $190.4 million for 345 awards in 2025, according to NIH data compiled by the WBJ Research Department.
Concerns over the President Donald Trump Administration’s overhaul to NIH funding had UMass Chan administrators at one point last year estimating the changes could cost the school up to $50 million, causing it to lay off staff and implement other cost-saving measures. The national fight over the NIH changes was eventually addressed by the courts.
While the funding granted to UMass Chan only dipped $3 million, the NIH’s forward funding policy implemented in summer 2025 has had a significantly greater impact.
Instead of paying multi-year NIH grants in annual increments from the agency’s budget, forward funding allows the agency to pay the full value of a grant in a single fiscal year.
While the same total funding is committed, researchers can access only one year of funding at a time, with the remainder held for future years.
At UMass Chan, $23 million of its fiscal year 2025 grants is tied to forward funding, with roughly $15 million reserved for future years, said Sarah Willey, UMass Chan assistant vice chancellor for media relations.
Including that figure, the university’s effective funding decline is about $18 million, Wiley said.
This means fewer researchers are being funded and projects are being discontinued, said Beth McCormick, UMass Chan chair and professor of microbiology.
“From the outside everything looks to be back on track but if you look beyond that façade, the current changes to funding policies by the National Institutes of Health are slowly eroding the bricks from the foundation of the biomedical research infrastructure,” McCormick said in a Jan. 21 announcement.
Worcester Polytechnic Institute, which was Central Massachusetts’ second-largest NIH recipient in fiscal year 2024, saw a $7.29-million increase in funding year over year to $12.25 million, the greatest increase among the 11 Central Massachusetts institutions that received the most NIH funding in fiscals 2024 and 2025. WPI received 17 awards in both fiscal years.
For fiscal 2025, WPI was outpaced as the region’s second-largest recipient by Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University in North Grafton, which received $10.86 million for 19 awards in NIH funding.
The top 10 Central Massachusetts NIH grant winners in fiscal year 2025 are:
- UMass Chan Medical School: $190.36 million from 345 awards
- Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University: $10.86 million from 19 awards
- Worcester Polytechnic Institute: $12.25 million from 17 awards
- Kephera Diagnostics LLC, in Framingham: $5.21 million from eight awards
- Microbiotix, in Worcester: $8.23 million from seven awards
- Helixbind, in Boxborough: $5.07 million from five awards
- Signablok, in Worcester: $1.44 million from three awards
- Outcome Referrals, in Framingham: $1.82 million from two awards
- General Biophysics LLC, in Framingham: $450,000 from two awards
- AutoIVF, in Sudbury: $997,028 from one award
Mica Kanner-Mascolo is a staff writer at Worcester Business Journal, who primarily covers the healthcare, manufacturing, and higher education industries.
